SpaceX rocket set for unintentional moon landing – well, a piece of it anyway
Comments
the_king
eagerpace
It's so much further advanced than anything anyone else is working on, does it really need to be on schedule? I feel like "on schedule" only pertains to non-research-intensive projects.
estearum
More bigger != more advanced != more economical != more sensical
And anyway yes there are programs that are dependent on Starship working on a schedule. If it doesn't work on schedule, those programs will advance without it and the Starship program will eventually fail.
ehsankia
SpaceX has had 165 launches in 2025 (although admittedly 75% of those were for Starlink...) Obviously bigger isn't more economical or sensical, and most cases are served just fine with the Falcons, but there are cases we need the big boy for, and it's good that someone is working on it and has made so much progress.
Obviously a semblance of a schedule is good to have, but realistically, that's not really how research works. Look at James Webb telescope, it was originally scheduled for 2007, and ended up launching 14 years later. It's still an amazing piece of engineer/science, and it's amazing that it's up there now, even if it was very late to it. It's much better to be late and successful than early and failing.
estearum
> but there are cases we need the big boy for, and it's good that someone is working on it and has made so much progress.
I am taking issue with this claim. Are there cases where the cost/benefit actually come out favorably for Starship as it is actually turning out? Are they cases anyone should actually care about beyond sci-fi fantasies (i.e. not "colonize Mars")?
xiphias2
Sure, I have crappy mobile reception a lot of times on my travels, so I'll be the first when finally Starship can launch satellites with antennas big enough so that my mobile phone can directly be used for internet access.
leereeves
Is SpaceX/Starlink actually planning to do that?
xiphias2
Yes, it's already working in US, but the current version is too slow.
Of course that's how they will make lots of money, not by rides to Mars.
abofh
No, but wasn't that a great use case?
eagerpace
There are so many individual features in this program that have never been done or even attempted before. That's "Advanced" in my book. Yes, they attached it to an overly ambitious program that is rife with delays (and hubris) but the program started on its own, is the best path to making the 2028 landing happen (it won't), and on its own is incredible.
estearum
Starship is at this point probably not even the best path to making a 2028 landing happen.
How many of those things that have never been done/attempted before sit downstream of poor strategic decisions?
eagerpace
You have to separate the two. There are no good options to 2028. It's just politics.
estearum
I don't know what "two" you're referring to, nor what politics.
panick21_
The alternative to Starship needs to solve many of the same problem and is from a less proven company. If they can do it, great but I don't think its more likely.
estearum
They really don't though! Starship chose to structure the problem such that they require this groundbreaking several-things-never-before-done design.
panick21_
Then tell me how to land 100t on the moon or mars without solving any of these problems.
Even if you want to put less then that on the moon, anything but a tiny lander still needs refueling and reusable launch.
Zigurd
Starship is going for a fully reusable upper stage. Google "second system syndrome." This is engineering by fiat. It could easily take another 10 years for upper stage reusability to be demonstrated, and another 10 to make it reliable. And that's generous because it implies that other problems like in orbit refueling will get solved in parallel. How many starship problems have actually been solved in parallel?
I became a starship skeptic because I thought the project management was bullshit. Nothing I've seen changes in my mind about that.
panick21_
I hate the typical "second system syndrome" nonsense. People always only use that for things that fail, while in reality plenty of second systems are good, technically and/or commercially.
Starship has come as close to landing an upper stage as its possible on water, and from orbital velocity. That's already a huge accomplishment and the landing on land has also been demonstrated.
Problems are constantly being worked on in parallel. Transferring fuel between tanks in the Ship is literally something already tested and that's a big part of the validation of inter-ship fuel transfer. There was even a NASA contract about exactly that. There is parallel work on the launch site, ship the booster and the interior (this is just less visible but its being worked on as we can see from the contract).
Orbital refueling can continually be worked on even if some ships fail landings.
> It could easily take another 10 years for upper stage reusability
Or it could take less ...
And even so, if we ever want a serious moon base, an architecture like that is required. The tiny BlueOrigin lander might be ok for flags and footprints but not to deploy serious infrastructure.
SecretDreams
On schedule pertains to anything where extraordinary schedule claims are unnecessarily made. Nobody would have to think about a schedule in this context if somebody did not regularly make bold schedule claims.
refulgentis
It does need to work at some point and I have a feeling it won't. Travelled from doubter => hyped => doubter. Something is very wrong.
7e
If my rocket doesn’t need to deliver any results on any timeline, it can be infinitely advanced. Convenient, right?
throwaway27448
Is it? It seems mostly similar to what we had fifty years ago.
consumer451
The issue is cadence. SpaceX is the king of cadence with Falcon 9, but if it takes >10 Starship Tanker launches to get all that excess mass of Starship HLS to the moon... prior to boil-off of the Starship HLS... holy crap, this is really hand wavy.
Even SpaceX will have a really hard time launching ~10 Tankers in the time required. What are the lower and upper bounds of that time required? Nobody knows. But, if it's less than many weeks, it's gonna be tough. That's ~weeks of HLS on orbit, getting refueled, with boil-off occurring.
SpaceX has many things correct, except for the vehicle size and design, as far as HLS goes.
hparadiz
If they manage to get 100T to the moon I don't really get why you wouldn't just leave the whole thing on the moon for materials to convert to habitat. Better off sending a smaller craft back with just life support and a heat shield. The Saturn V took 50T to the moon but they send only the LM down and when it came back up they basically ditched a ton of gear so they could bring moon rocks back. But it was still basically a tiny box with about two tons of propellent to get them back to lunar orbit.
So anyway the math is weird to only get twice that payload but require 10x more propellent.
kevin_thibedeau
That's why BO will ultimately be landing before SpaceX gets the chance and likely after the Chinese.
consumer451
I don't know about the CCP program at all. However, Blue's HLS plan for winning the USA race to the moon is far simpler than Spacex's plan. Even at Blue's relative glacial pace, that is actually possible. Starship is designed for atmospheric entry to Mars. Ain't no atmosphere on the moon. Wrong design for the moon.
I am a huge space nerd, therefore I have a lot of respect for SpaceX, and I have been hating on Blue for years. As weird as it is, Blue might actually beat SpaceX to the moon. Just the real chance of that is crazy, and if you look at the logistics, there's a real chance.
In the long term, aside from HLS, Stoke Aerospace has the coolest design. Late mover advantage.
kevin_thibedeau
Landing Flash Gordon style with exposed ascent engines on an unprepared dirt and rock surface is not a recipe for success regardless of the gravity involved. Until they come up with some Marston matting style deployable landing surface, their system will never work. Furthermore, Apollo 15 was tilted 10° with a relatively squat design to the LEM. A skinny tower would not have survived that.
hparadiz
It's supposed to handle up to 8 degrees but there's lots of locations at the south pole with < 2 degrees of slope.
gregjor
The warp drives in Star Trek seem awesome too, we're just behind schedule.
Starship excels at funneling tax money into Musk's various enterprises. Whether it actually reaches orbit, much less the moon or Mars, merely incidental, the sexy marketing photos for an imaginary island resort.
By the time Starship does actually achieve orbit it will likely get damaged by all of the debris SpaceX has parked around the planet.
croddin
Nah we're good Zefram Cochrane's first warp flight wasn't till 2063 ;-)
wolvoleo
> The warp drives in Star Trek seem awesome too, we're just behind schedule.
They're not scheduled until 2063 :)
eagerpace
Think of all the childcare and hospice centers we could fund with it!
SecretDreams
> but you have to admit it's way behind schedule
Shouldn't even be phrased like this. We can cheer for progress without simping so badly that we can't acknowledge failures and missteps.
Space is hard and over promising and under delivering are real possibilities that a hype-person cannot run from. Just moderate the hype and let the engineers cook - is that so hard??
7e
The engines are so awesome that test flights are loaded with 10% of the promised capacity of the rocket. Someone is blowing smoke up your ass.
LeoPanthera
"List of artificial objects on the Moon"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_...
It's a lot more than you might think, and I couldn't find a comprehensive list of the non-spacecraft objects, some of which are hinted at in the first paragraph.
Polizeiposaune
The later Apollo missions (13-17) deliberately crashed their 3rd stages into the moon, in part to provide a signal for the seismometer packages left at each of the landing sites. They hit the moon a little faster than the Falcon 9 2nd stage will hit (2.6km/s vs 2.43km/s for the new one).
All of those impact sites have been located but the last one wasn't pinpointed until 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moon-mystery-solved-apollo-rock...
anticensor
Let's make it intentional and controlled then.
cucumber3732842
They should paint a cowboy onto all the ones they aren't trying to re-use. Would fit with the Texas motif of the operation.
flockonus
Curious to see if to what intensity the Moon will "ring like a bell" at this one.
ref: https://books.google.ie/books?id=6QAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA...
spwa4
What I think is very ironic is that Blue Origin actually beat SpaceX to Mars, after a decade of SpaceX "make life multiplanetary". A few months after Blue Origin did that SpaceX announced now they'll just go to the Moon, no more Mars.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-blue-origin-launch-tw...
dmix
That article says that Rocket Lab is building the spacecraft designed by NASA. Blue Origin is just launching it.
Falcon Heavy launched a spacecraft that used a Mars gravity assist in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft) same with the Europa Clipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper going to Jupiter
dylan604
They also launched the roadster that has an orbital radius out to the distance of Mars
GMoromisato
That's not irony, that's shallow thinking. If you want to "make life multiplanetary" you would do it by building a very large, reusable, refillable rocket that can land 100 tons on Mars.
Which is exactly what SpaceX is doing.
[p.s.: The drive to land on the moon makes sense in the context of "how can we fund colonizing Mars?" Starlink funded the initial development of Starship. Musk believes (rightly or wrongly) that data centers in orbit and on the moon can fund the next set of projects.]
danaw
also a great way to raise money on abstract and impossible promises, musks specialty
michaelmrose
Data Centers in orbit could be the single dumbest idea Musk has ever expressed. They would be in every respect worse than on land and there is just no solution for heat dissapation.
As stupid as the basic idea is the scope he's described is beyond any reasonable endeavor it's nor clear our society could achieve it if it was the singular goal of our species and what for? There is simply no use nor demand for it and it's by no means a durable investment we should have to continue the effort forever to sustain it.
trueno
inb4 wreckage on the moon that stays there forever
drivebyhooting
Several times the speed of sound? That is meaningless when there is no media for the sound waves. I think a better unit might be furlongs per fortnight.
ambicapter
From TFA:
> 2.43 kilometers a second, or 1.51 miles a second, or 5,400 miles an hour, or 8,700 kilometers an hour.
> There is, of course, no air and no sound on the Moon, so a "Mach number" doesn't really make sense. But if there were air, the speed would be about Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound.
roelschroeven
"If there were air". Air at which temperature though? Th sound of speed, and hence what Mach numbers mean, depends on the temperature of the air. The temperature air would have at the moon's surface? By day or by night? Or the air at Earth's surface? Or at some other altitude?
SecretDreams
How many Machs is the earth moving?
jghn
What about giraffe lengths per second?
hgoel
"several times the speed of sound" is obviously just meant to mean really fast to earthlings in relation to their speed of sound.
__m
It’s not a constant on earth either, should have used km/h instead for a relate able number
sandworm101
Well, there is a speed of sound on the moon. Sound does travel through the regolith. If you were standing on the moon you would indeed "hear" this impact as the sound moved up through your feet. It would sound/feel like standing beside a subwoofer.
throwaway27448
I wouldn't call that sound but you can call whatever you want whatever you want, I suppose
matttttttttttt
Transverse pressure waves?
I still call it sound when I hear things under water. Gas isn't special.
When someone knocks on your door, you still say you heard the sound, even though the pressure wave was transmitted through the solid door material (before then being transmised to the gas in the room). Likewise, we still file a noise complaint when the neighbor is throwing a raging party, even though we are feeling the bass as much as we are hearing it.
sandworm101
And many old dogs, who may be totally deaf, can still hear/feel someone knocking on the front door. You don't need ears to detect vibrations.
sandworm101
Like putting your head on a railway track to hear a train? Sound is sound.
throwaway27448
To me, sound is a particular element of human perception. Not all pressure waves are going to be perceived as sound.
I cannot wait for Starship to become a real thing, but you have to admit it's way behind schedule. The engines are awesome now.